Skilled, competent and thriving doers

The process of re-thinking the concept of work has started.

The rapid development of technology, especially artificial intelligence (AI), will most likely cause a work life revolution that can be compared to industrialization. The upcoming transformation can be even bigger, depending on how the national governments, businesses, civil society, and international and regional organizations will respond to this rapidly moving transformation.

At the same time, we have the digital divide to bridge. Still, about 37 % of world’s population don’t have access to internet, and even the group of people who have access, are in a very polarized situation. The digital divide is not just about access to internet, but is made up of for example digital skills, linguistic and literacy barriers, quality of infrastructure, access to content, as well as of gender inequality (UN ITU 2021).

In our European and Finnish context, good digital skills are seen as a necessity for the modern workforce. The challenge is, that digital skills requirements and used software are also changing rapidly, and the digital skills needed in working life are usually learned at work, which creates a challenge for those working-age adults who are outside working life (DPDSA, Digital Skills Report 2022).

At this stage we can already summarize that future work requires us, above all, continuous learning and abilities to adapt to changing work environments. For this reason creating opportunities for continuous learning to all, including for people who, for a reason or another, are outside work life, is crucial.

The discussion about future work life competences doesn’t focus just on digital skills, but emphasizes a lot of soft skills, which refer to non-technical skills like communications and teamwork skills, time management, ability to lead own work, problem solving skills, intercultural understanding, and creative and critical thinking.

Soft skills are skills that are needed in any work environment, skills that help us to adapt to changes, and skills that affect our performance.

In the near future, analytical thinking is considered to be the number one skill according to private companies, followed by creative thinking, resilience, flexibility, agility, motivation, and self-awareness (WEF, Future of Jobs 2023).

The Digital Skills Report (2022) talks also about digital courage as one of the key competences in the future, which can be seen as a soft skill. Digital courage means the readiness to try and introduce new or updated digital devices and services or become more skilled in using them.

Another cross-cutting combination of different soft skills, is media literacy. It has become more and more evident that there’s a growing need to strengthen media and information literacy skills among the working-age adults.

In our work we are focusing on strenghtening the soft skills, digital courage, and career development among women, and especially among migrant women.

Women in particular stand to gain or lose from the future of work due to persistent gender inequality. Globally, 40 million to 160 million women might face the need to transition between occupations by 2030, often into higher-skilled roles (UNDP, 2023).

In the Finnish context women still carry majority of the unpaid care work (e.g. domestic work, care of children and the elderly), and for this reason face more challenges in balancing work and family life. Women are also more likely to stay longer periods at home with children, which puts them into more vulnerable situation in the rapidly changing job-market.

Migrant women face also additional challenges, like the language barrier and lack of networks. Despite the growing employment rate of migrant women in Finland (68% in 2022), we haven’t yet managed to overcome all challenges‒especially women from non-EU countries continue to struggle to find employment in Finland (European Migration Network, 2021).

There are also graduate fields, like social sciences and humanities, where most graduates must themselves figure out what could be their future profession, and where and how they will develop their expertise. In these fields deep societal knowledge and work experience gained in Finland, play also a higher role in employability and career development, compared to for example technology or IT sector.

Entering the Finnish job-market on these fields, requires good self-awareness, flexibility, and strong abilities for creative career planning. There’s also a lot of untapped entrepreneurial potential among this target group, that could be freed by supporting creative thinking and imagining of alternative career paths.

At the same time when we need to re-think our approach to work as employers and employees, we also need to strenghten our abilities to manage expectation and concerns, and to perform in a culturally and ethnically diverse work environment.

Employer and employee expectations towards work; negative and positive experiences, attitudes and mindset barriers for migrant employability; root causes and prevention of prejudice and discrimination; as well as work life balance and well-being in a culturally and ethnically diverse work environment, should all be shared and discussed in a more honest, transparent and open way.

At the same time we need to be able to create inclusive and safe spaces for this kind of information sharing, learning and dialogue.

A lot depends on our generation to make sure that re-thinking of work will not lead to a social crisis, or to a growing global injustice. Therefore, there’s also a high need to engaging and inclusive public debate focusing, not just on the benefits of digitalization or AI, but also on the ethical and human concerns that these developments bring along.

The main question we are trying to solve is, how to make sure that we have the required skills and competences for future work life, and are able to create ethnically and culturally diverse work communities where everyone can thrive?

We expect to see

1) Working-aged women, especially migrant women, with strengthened soft skills and digital courage.

2) Migrant women with degree in social sciences, humanities, media studies or communications have strengthened societal understanding and ability to build their career in the Finnish job-market.

3) New tools for learning and spaces for dialogue in employer’s and employee’s use, that strenghten migrant employability and creation of ethnically and culturally diverse work communities where everyone can thrive.